Introduction

Solidigm is a U.S. subsidiary of Korean flash giant SK Hynix. The company was formed after Intel gave up on its NAND and SSD business and sold it to Hynix. While the company has inherited several products from Intel, like the 660p and 670p, they are now expanding their lineup with more modern offerings.



Today we are reviewing the Solidigm P44 Pro in the 1 TB and 2 TB version. This is Solidigm's second SSD release under their own brand, after the P41 Plus a few months ago. The Solidigm P44 Pro is based on the Hynix ACNS075 controller, paired with Hynix 176-layer 3D TLC NAND flash. This means that the P44 Pro has the same hardware configuration as the Hynix Platinum P41 SSD—the fastest SSD we ever tested. As expected for the high-end positioning of the product, a DRAM cache chip is included, too.

The Solidigm P44 Pro comes in capacities of 512 GB ($80), 1 TB ($130) and 2 TB ($235). Endurance for these models is set to 500 TBW, 750 TBW, and 1200 TBW, respectively. Solidigm includes a five-year warranty with the P44 Pro SSD.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, making it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


While most other M.2 NVMe SSDs transfer data over the PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface, the Solidigm P44 Pro connects to the host system using PCI-Express 4.0 x4, doubling the theoretical bandwidth.


On the PCB you'll find the controller, two flash chips and a DRAM cache chip.


The 1 TB version looks exactly the same as the 2 TB version. It uses flash chips with half the capacity and a smaller DRAM cache chip.

Chip Component Analysis

The Hynix ACNS075 controller is a new in-house development by Hynix with support for PCI-Express 4.0. Unfortunately, not much is known about this controller yet.


The two flash chips are Hynix 176-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 1 TB (on the 2 TB drive), and 512 GB (on the 1 TB drive).


One Hynix LPDDR4-4266 chip provides 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables. On the 1 TB version a LPDDR4 DRAM chip with 1 GB capacity is used.

Test Setup